America is once again in a sharply polarized era, which makes Lee Drutman of the nonpartisan group New America optimistic. He notes that such times spurred the Revolutionary War and Civil Rights era. Scott Simon, Weekend Edition Saturday, NPR Read more »
Political Communication Meets Big Data
How do voters make sense of the information they hear about candidates in the news and through social media? This question was at the heart of a collaboration between researchers at the University of Michigan, Georgetown University, and Gallup to study political communication that took place during the 2016 U.S. […] Read more »
What past impeachments tell us about Trump’s 2020 prospects
History signals that the public’s final verdict on President Donald Trump’s possible impeachment won’t be delivered until the 2020 election — whatever happens next in the House and Senate, and however Americans react to it. … “The whole impeachment debate has intensified preexisting feelings about the President,” says Republican pollster […] Read more »
A Former Fox News Executive Divides Americans Using Russian Tactics
At first glance, the websites Conservative Edition News and Liberal Edition News have only one thing in common: Both have been carefully curated to inflame America’s culture wars. … The sites are the work of Ken LaCorte, the former Fox News executive who was accused of killing a story about […] Read more »
AP-NORC/USAFacts Poll: Facts missing from American democracy
At a time when many Americans say they’re struggling to distinguish between fact and fiction, the country is broadly skeptical that facts underlie some of the basic mechanisms of democracy in the United States — from political campaigns to voting choices to the policy decisions made by elected officials. CONT. […] Read more »
‘No One Believes Anything’: Voters Worn Out by a Fog of Political News
… The Democrats in Congress took their case against President Trump to the public last week. But after hours of testimony, thousands of news reports and days of streaming headlines, one thing was clear: A lot of Americans weren’t listening. … In this volatile political moment, information, it would seem, […] Read more »